The present invention relates to a method for locating a failure of a communication line in a communication line management system, and more particularly to a method for testing a communication line according to self-adjusted test point priorities in a communication line management system, which automatically determines the order of testing the points for locating a failure.
Conventionally, the dedicated communication network provides dedicated communication lines with remote test units (RTUs) respectively connected to the equipments of their telephone office to test their failures. Hence, when the telephone office receives a trouble report from a subscriber of a dedicated communication line, an operator tests the RTUs connected with the dedicated line to locate a failure, and notifies an engineer in charge to repair it.
Hence, such conventional test method depends on the experience, capability and arbitrary judgment of the operator to locate the failure, so that the time taken for locating it is prolonged or shortened depending on the abilities of the operators and the number of operators participating in the test. This method is not desirable in the present environment requiring a great number of high-speed dedicated communication lines especially for Internet.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a dedicated communication line management system with a method for automatically testing a dedicated communication line that eliminates the manual testing to locate a failure.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a dedicated communication line management system with a method for automatically testing a dedicated communication line according to priorities of the test points in the order of high failure probability so that the test interval to locate a failure may be narrowed in a time as short as possible.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide a dedicated communication line management system with a recording medium programmed by a computer to perform the inventive method.
According to an aspect of the present invention, there is provided a method for locating a failure of a communication line according to self-adjusted priorities of the test points in the order of high failure probability in a communication line management system, comprises the steps of organizing the test points, information on the test history of the test points, and test point search priorities (TSPs) representing the priorities of the test points in the order of high failure probability into a test database, searching the test database to determine the testing order of the test points according to the TSPs, testing the test points in the testing order to locate the failure, and revising the values of the TSPs according to the test results and the location of the failure.
According to another aspect of the present invention, there is provided a computer readable recording media storing instructions for executing a method for locating a failure of a communication line according to self-adjusted priorities of the test points in the order of high failure probability, which comprises the steps of organizing the test points, information on the test history of the test points, and test point search priorities (TSPs) representing the priorities of the test points in the order of high failure probability into a test database, searching the test database to determine the testing order of the test points according to the TSPs, testing the test points in the testing order to locate the failure, and revising the values of the data fields of the TSPs according to the test results and the location of the failure.